The exact dates of the Dog Days can vary from source to source, and because they are traditionally tied to the dawn rising of Sirius, they have changed over time. However, most sources agree that the Dog Days occur in mid-to-late summer.
Here at the Old Farmer’s Almanac, we consider the Dog Days to be the 40 days beginning July 3 and ending August 11. These days occur soon after the summer solstice in late June, which also tends to be the beginning of the worst of summer’s heat.
Posts in: Quote posts
This morning I read the chapter “A Mother’s Work” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, she reflects on the process of cleaning up a pond so that her daughters can swim in it. Best chapter of the book so far.
So it is my grandchildren who will swim in this pond, and others whom the years will bring. The circle of care grows larger and caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters. The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream. My pond drains to the brook, to the creek, to a great and needful lake. The water net connects us all. I have shed tears into that flow when I thought that motherhood would end. But the pond has shown me that being a good mother doesn’t end with creating a home where just my children can flourish. A good mother grows into a richly eutrophic old woman, knowing that her work doesn’t end until she creates a home where all of life’s beings can flourish. There are grandchildren to nurture, and frog children, nestlings, goslings, seedlings, and spores, and I still want to be a good mother.
A more elegant way of saying what I was trying to say yesterday. Robin Wall Kimmerer:
When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
… When my daughters remember our sugaring adventure now, they roll their eyes and groan, “That was so much work.” They remember hauling branches to feed the fire and slopping sap on their jackets as they carried heavy buckets. They tease me about being a wretched mother who wove their connection to the land through forced labor. They were awfully little to be doing the work of a sugaring crew. But they also remember the wonder of drinking sap straight from the tree. Sap, but not syrup. Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness.
Simply put, the way we were taught the market for consumer goods is supposed to work does not seem to hold anymore. The market was supposed to incentivize businesses to offer attractive products, at competitive prices, in a convenient format, and then customers were supposed to respond to those positive signals by rewarding them with their business. Now businesses increasingly take actively customer-hostile actions — locking up products, replacing paper menus with cumbersome QR codes, and of course chronically understaffing everything, which is the root of all of these issues — and insulate themselves from any feedback.
Thomas Berry: “the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.” (Via Braiding Sweetgrass)
I really like this working definition of enchantment from R.G. Miga:
Enchantment is the process of creating and sustaining a symbolic interface that corresponds to one or more hyperobjects, in order to generate participatory consciousness.
He applies this to the Green Man (a figure that those have followed my blog for a while will know is important to me):
Growth is a hyperobject. It’s non-local, molten, phased, inter-objective, and viscous. Like gravity, Growth is familiar and necessary at human scale—but becomes horrifying and monstrous in its totality. We recognize that life depends on Growth at a measured pace; when it tips into a blind force, we instinctively recoil from it. Growth brings the corn up in the fields. Growth is also cancer. Growth is the visceral unease of being in the dense jungle, surrounded by a billion grasping mouths, all indifferent to anything but the pursuit of more. Our own Growth as a species keeps our children alive and safe, while cutting a broad swathe of murder and destruction across the planet. Time-bound humans have a hard time experiencing Growth as anything other than an acceleration toward Decay, its terminal opposite. And depending on which physicists you believe—Growth will eventually tear apart the fabric of the universe.
Something like the Green Man could be seen as a symbolic interface that enables participatory consciousness with the hyperobject of Growth. The symbolic representation of the Green Man is, at once, a human face consumed by vegetal growth and vegetal growth itself, anthropomorphized.
… Establishing a participatory consciousness with the Green Man allows us to relate to Growth at a human scale: by understanding some of what it wants (its telos), forgiving its excesses, and finding ways of cooperating with it.
Miga’s earlier essay, which is referred to in this one, is also worth reading.
This, from Freddie deBoer (via @ayjay), is true. I picked up the opinions habit early on because I thought it was what intelligent people were supposed to do. I’m now trying to unlearn it, in part because (as Freddie says) arguing over opinions is deeply unpleasant to me.
For a very large swath of the human population, probably the majority, constantly forming and expressing and fighting over opinions on contentious topics is an unusual and unpleasant activity. It’s not that many people out there just don’t naturally form opinions, on art and culture and politics, the way anyone does. But to think of those opinions as something to constantly bring into a state of contention with others, to argue all the time as a matter of day-to-day life, is intimidating even for many smart and principled people. It’s hard to recall now, but there was a very recent period in which most people had no greater opportunity to share their opinions than to say them out loud at work or a bar or during the fellowship service after church. The truly motivated might stand on the street with a bullhorn or start a paper newsletter or write letters to the editor. Most people never bothered. The cacophony of opinion we live in is very new.
Pleasure and pain, love and death, exist in an unresolved and irresolvable tension with one another. For the Preacher, only God is whole, and so we should seek God, not the broken and partial satisfactions of this life. The nihilist is a disappointed moralist, one who has given up on any principle of unity by which the broken fragments of existence can be brought together, save their negation. Thus at the heart of the nihilist’s cosmos is an endless blank void where God used to be. For Wotan, though, a principle of unity is never sought and so is never missed. To everything there is a season (a biblical line that Wotan could probably get behind), a season for each broken and unreconciled aspect of existence, and those seasons cycle endlessly. To a certain sort of mind this is a dismal prospect, an unmeaning cycle that grinds on forever. Such a mind needs a “higher purpose,” a telos, a meaning to it all, an ending to “redeem” or “transcend” the cycle. Such a mind wants a cure for the human condition. Wotan accepts the human condition as it is. He is the human condition. He is the human condition in the form of a god. There is no “cure” for him: he is enough.
The longer the litanies of crises grow, the more favorable the winds become to return us to home. Not the idealized homes of the urban condo dwellers thumbscrolling digital catalogues of trade spoils from distant lands, nor the cramped apartments of workers crowded with cheap plastic and screens displaying simulacra of lives lived elsewhere. The home towards which these winds blow is not the “normal” we delude ourselves into believing will return after each crisis passes, nor the utopian fantasies that we can have everything we want without any of the effects our rapacious desire causes.
The home towards which these winds come is a home we may not yet recognise, since it has been so long since we’ve been there. Much has changed since we left it: fewer forests, fewer insects, fewer animals, fewer wilds. A thick dust of forgetting has fallen over every room, obscuring what we once cherished as dear and celebrated as beautiful. Too long at sea seeking wealth and wonder, we may not even remember how to live the kinds of lives one lives at home.
Fortunately, it is mostly only a matter of remembering, and it’s most often all joy. What is it like to grow a bit of one’s food at home, rather than shop for it in garishly-lit warehouses? What does one do without a screen to tell you what to think? How does one meet other humans without algorithmic filters telling you who “likes” you? How do we provide for ourselves without capitalist networks of distribution, employment, and management?
It is mostly only a matter of remembering, but it will also be a matter of learning anew, and this will not always be joy. We will need to learn anew how to survive without being told how to survive, without anyone managing our desires, telling us what we need, and re-assuring us that it’s all under control. We’ll need to wean ourselves off the opiates of lies, false visions of a future where the earth does what we want it to, rather than what it does. We’ll need to learn what addicts in recovery learn, that our sense of control was always only an illusion of control.
Soon I will be well again. I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end. Woodworking, as with all hand crafts, demands that we live and work within the parameters of our human limitations.
I love this: “I’m a patient man because I was trained to that end.” Patience is often seen as a sort of inborn trait: you either have it or you don’t. This, however, reminds us that patience is trainable, particularly as a result of long attentiveness to a craft.